3 ms·
Spot prices are not for everyone. If you have an EV or if you plan other energy intensive activities smarter (like heating/cooling, washing+drying), you can sa
by flavius29663 5y ago
Spot prices are not for everyone.
If you have an EV or if you plan other energy intensive activities smarter (like heating/cooling, washing+drying), you can save significantly more than 20 bucks a month.
This is not a unique Texas solution to this problem. In the UK for example, a lot of people take out their gas heating and replace it with electric ones that can be "charged" overnight at cheap prices.
It's the same think with credit cards and loans: they can absolutely wreck uneducated people, but they're not essentially bad if you know how to use them, they're quite advantageous.
- tw04 5y agoYou're arguing for normal operations, which nobody is disagreeing with. The sticking point you hand-waved away is what happens in an emergency. Telling someone "well you saved money over the last decade, SURPRISE!" isn't an acceptable situation for a utility.
- flavius29663 5y agoI'm arguing for not trashing the idea of spot pricing because of one emergency. They could use better regulations for emergency situations, to prevent both customers and distributors going bankrupt, but making the case that spot pricing is bad because of what happened in Texas is short sighted. When the situation became a state of emergency, they could have stopped free trading and just provide everything they can, leaving the accounting for later. Or just capping the price to a lower level. In the meantime, spot pricing would be a very good thing to happen all across America, as I said - it's contributing massively to the de-carbonification of UK. Demand response would help reduce a lot of the spikes in usage, and make renewables integration easier.